It’s been a tumultuous week for the SEC so far with nearly its entire Saturday slate sidelined due to spikes in COVID-19, the conference is in store for some major shifting and rescheduling with more and more open weeks being taken up. One of the games delayed was Alabama’s trip down to Baton Rouge to see revenge against LSU.
A game that is typically highly anticipated amongst both fanbases and teams will now need to wait possibly beyond the Dec.12 make-up week.
For the time being, both coaches will need to manage the uncertainties to come later in the season, and Crimson Tide head coach Nick Saban is trying to keep his team on the roll it’s been on since Week One.
“We were certainly looking forward to playing a game, but I think that we kind of expect disruptions during this season,” Saban said during his Wednesday teleconference. “How we handle them is probably the most important thing right now. What we’d like to try to do is try to keep our team in some kind of rhythm relative to how we practice and we continue to try to improve to finish this season.”
Leading up to the game Alabama had done a solid job as a team from withholding itself from infection from the virus. According to Saban, the team had just one positive test. But what has thrown this week off course for LSU and other teams in the SEC is the contact tracing mandated by the conference.
“I think we knew the social tracing part of this would be a bigger issue than the testing,” Saban said. “The testing, you know exactly what you get; the social tracing part, it’s a safety issue we have to go through, but you’re quarantining people and you don’t even know if they’re sick or not. That’s the part that’s a little more difficult to manage.”
Rumors had swirled around a Halloween part being the main cause of the spike in positive tests for LSU. While head coach Ed Orgeron has denied these rumors, whenever players leave the bubble of the football program it is believed that they are at more risk to obtain the virus.
Saban has been a big believer in the program bubble and realized the dangers and let his players know how to conduct themselves when the Crimson Tide headed into it’s bye week with multiple athletes deciding to go home to their families.
“Everybody trusts their family, I trust my family, but nobody knows where Uncle Tommy’s been either, Saban said. “The other option is don’t let the players go anyplace, which is kind of a punishment. Most of the players wanted to see their families. I can’t verify that we didn’t have somebody go someplace that they weren’t supposed to go, but if they did, we’ll certainly confront them with why they didn’t do what we asked them to do because if a player did that, he actually doesn’t just put himself at risk, he’s putting his teammates at risk when he comes back and everybody else.
And that’s the one thing our players have been pretty good about so far this year”
Now having two weeks off in a row, Saban and Alabama will do its best to stay in its rhythm this week with added practices over the weekend to not lost its stride.
“We’re trying to stay in the same rhythm that we would,” Saban said. “We usually have a light practice on Monday, practice Tuesday and Wednesday, a little bit of a light practice on Thursday, no practice on Friday and play a game on Saturday. So we’ll probably do the same thing. Obviously, we don’t have a game, but to keep the rhythm, probably have some kind of practice Saturday.”
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Patrick Dowd is a Reporter for Touchdown Alabama Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter, via Pat_Dowd77
